Peter Jackson is tired. ‘He’ll probably lie on that,’ says his PA, indicating a voluminous sofa that dominates the London hotel suite we’re meeting in, and sure enough, no sooner is Jackson through the door than he’s curling himself into its contours and taking pallid sips from a cup of milky tea.

He flew in from his native New Zealand the previous day and, as he gets older – he’s 48 now – his jet lag gets worse.

‘It’s particularly bad this time,’ he says, in his soft Antipodean lilt. ‘I mean, I couldn’t even stay awake for Top Gear on television last night and I love that show.’

Here, immediately, are two surprising things about Peter Jackson: firstly, that the directorial eminence behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy (nearly £1.8 billion – grossed, 17 Oscars scooped) should be a fan of The Stig and co; and, secondly, that he seems pretty unassuming for a world-conquering movie mogul. For that’s certainly what he is.

The Rings trilogy, and his 2005 remake of King Kong, cost – and recouped, with interest – hundreds of millions of dollars and seemed to enlist the entire population and land mass of New Zealand in their making.

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His Stone Street Studios production facility, in Wellington, is a vast empire of post-production barns and visual effects laboratories that employs more than 500 people.

It has created everything from the ‘prawn’ aliens in the low-budget horror-comedy District 9 (which Jackson produced), to the CGI effects for James Cameron’s Avatar, to the sets for Guillermo Del Toro’s forthcoming adaptation of The Hobbit (which Jackson is also producing), to the motion-capture effects for Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming Tintin movie, to the hallucinatory set pieces in Jackson’s own new Oscar-tipped offering, an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones.

But while Jackson regularly nestles at or near the top of film industry most-powerful lists, he’s the antithesis of the monocle-sporting, messianic director-dictators of legend.

He’s slight (the 70lb he lost a few years ago have been kept at bay by ‘the liberal application of yogurt’), rumpled and abstracted (the same PA that directs him toward sofas often has to remind him to don his beaten-up trainers rather than walk around barefoot).

His hooded eyes and languorous smile exemplify his dreamy, dormouse-like demeanour. He emphasises the collegiality of his working methods, both off set – his constant writing partners are Fran Walsh, his wife of 20 years (they met on the set of the television special Worzel Gummidge Down Under), and their friend Philippa Boyens.

The notoriously prickly James Cameron says that he was inspired to make Avatar after seeing Jackson’s CGI-generated Gollum in the Rings trilogy.

‘I read an interview with a director a couple of weeks ago, and I truthfully can’t remember who it was, though it wasn’t Jim Cameron,’ he grins, ‘but this guy was saying that the only really creative ideas come from a stressful set; that it’s only from tension and anger that real emotions and creativity can be born.’

He looks incredulous. ‘I was reading this, thinking: “What a lot of nonsense.” I would never work in that way. You’re shooting a movie for eight months, why would you want to make it unpleasant for people?’

Jackson’s modus operandi, he says, is encapsulated in an old Alfred Hitchcock quote: ‘Other people’s films are slices of life; mine are slices of cake.’

If that’s the case, then The Lovely Bones is a rich, spicy stollen, a little overladen with icing sugar.

Sebold’s wildly popular 2002 novel – it’s sold more than 10 million copies – is narrated by Susie Salmon, a 14 year-old who’s been raped and murdered by a neighbourhood pervert, and now finds herself attempting to guide her shattered family toward her killer from the ‘in-between world’ of the afterlife.

Bearing in mind that Jackson could probably have greenlit any project off the back of the Rings movies and King Kong, what made him alight on this dreamy meditation on life, death and enduring love?

The answer, it turns out, lies in Watford town hall in 2002. ‘I was in Watford, scoring The Two Towers,’ recalls Jackson, assuming a horizontal position.

‘Philippa came over to visit, and she’d bought The Lovely Bones at an airport bookstore on the way through and loved it. Fran grabbed it off her and she was really emotionally affected by it. So then, of course, I had to read it and it blew me away, too.

We were getting to the age where we were starting to lose friends and relations [both Jackson’s parents died during the making of the Rings trilogy] and the book speaks to all those things, plus it’s kind of comforting, too.

But I can honestly say that adapting The Lovely Bones was the hardest thing we’ve ever done. The book is like a wonderful puzzle and you have to make decisions about what to leave in or take out.’

If this sounds like a disclaimer, it may be because early reviews of the film have taken Jackson to task for playing down the horror and trauma of the book, expunging any hint of Susie’s rape.

He says he didn’t want to make a sentimental tear-jerker, but at the same time he wanted to secure a PG-13 rating. ‘It’s a film about how love never really dies and how time heals,’ Jackson says.

‘It’s not a murder film and I wanted kids to be able to go and see it. Film is such a powerful medium. It’s like a weapon and I think you have a duty to self-censor.

'There are some people who might enjoy watching a 14-year-old girl getting killed, a small minority maybe, but how could you live with yourself in providing that titillation? I wouldn’t want the movie defined by that.’

At this point, people familiar with Jackson’s oeuvre may be finding their eyebrows disappearing into their hairline.

is this the same director who once declared: ‘I didn’t want to make movies, I wanted to make monsters’?

Who shot his first version of King Kong when he was 12, with a ‘star’ made out of a bit of tatty rubber tubing?

Whose first three films, Bad Taste (1987), Meet the Feebles (1989) and Braindead (1992), featured cannibalistic aliens, drug-addicted nympho puppets and voracious zombified soccer-moms respectively, and inspired a Tory MP to declare that he should be banned from Britain?

Actually, according to Jackson, those early efforts, with their trash aesthetic – grilled mashed potato doubling for brain-splatter, bodies ground up in electric lawnmowers – have more in common with Buster Keaton than the torture-porn of the Saw franchise.

‘I call them splat-stick,’ he says. ‘To me, they were a joke. We enjoyed being crazy and anarchic and upsetting the people we wanted to upset in those days. But, big puppets having sex? It’s harmless, surely. The Saw movies, well,’ he trails off. ‘I don’t want to be casting moral judgments, but I don’t like those films.’

For all his success – his wealth is estimated at $450 million – Jackson remains the archetypal movie geek; an only child who made his first film – a Second World War epic, in which he played all the parts – at nine, while devouring Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine.

Jackson grew up several miles up the coast from Wellington in the town of Pukerua Bay – the meadows, woodlands and seascapes that later stood in for Middle-earth were all visible from his front door – and, while his parents wanted him to be an architect, they supported their Ray Harryhausen-besotted, stop-motion-splicing son when he left school at 16, getting a job as a photoengraver on the Wellington Evening Post while baking latex masks and synthesising fake blood in the family kitchen in preparation for Bad Taste.

As to his future projects, he talks of some possible ‘guerrilla film-making’ while Del Toro crafts his two-movie Hobbit project.

‘He has 13 to 14 months of shooting and while I have no place on the set – I mean, he doesn’t want me peering over his shoulder – I might be quite tempted to sneak in and rattle something off on the weekends.’

Jackson’s next bona fide directing job is the second movie, following Spielberg’s, in the projected Tintin series.

Jackson remains about as geographically distant from the fleshpots of Beverly Hills as it’s possible to be without falling off the edge of the world. But he certainly isn’t immune to the pressures of being a public figure.

After all, he’s a big fish in a small Antipodean pond – those who don’t work for him in Wellington certainly recognise him – and he’s expressed concern in the past not so much for himself, but for his children, Billy and Katie, now teenagers.

‘After we had the premiere for Return of the King in Wellington,’ he says, ‘the mayor called and said they wanted to name the airport after me.’ He still looks aghast at the memory.

‘I just said, with all due respect, no thanks. I didn’t want my kids having to pass through an airport named after their father. Just the thought of it freaked me out a little.’

But while he might have spared them the ignominy of Peter Jackson International, he’s not holding his breath for the plaudits.

‘My kids send up what I do mercilessly, which is a very healthy thing,’ he grins. ‘I don’t think either of them want to be film-makers, probably because they’ve spent their formative years getting excruciatingly bored on movie sets.

'I’ve got some credit from my son for The Lovely Bones, but only because we’ve got Michael Imperioli and he’s just worked his way through The Sopranos box-set. Other than that, they’re not terribly impressed.'